दुनिया शराबख़ाना (भाग 1)

'Duniya Sharaab Khana' is the longest item on the Sharbati Ankhen (1945) song list, catalogued in two parts across the two sides of a record. This is Part I, sung by Hamida Banu to Tanveer Naqvi's lyric and Feroz Nizami's music; Part II is credited to Zeenat Begum. A two-part song was standard practice for anything that would not fit one side of a 78, but two-part songs almost always stayed with a single voice, so the change of singer between the sides is a genuine oddity in the record. No audio of either part is in circulation.

The number is catalogued in two parts, which in 1945 practice means it filled both sides of a single 78-rpm disc — the usual solution when a song ran past the three-and-a-half minutes one side allowed. What is unusual here is that the two sides carry two different singers, Hamida Banu on the first and Zeenat Begum on the second. Whether that reflects a genuine two-voice structure in the film or an error in the surviving catalogue cannot be settled, because no audio of either part is in circulation.

'Sharaab-khana' is the tavern, and it is one of the load-bearing images of Persian and Urdu poetry: the maikhana of the ghazal, where wine has almost never meant only wine and drunkenness is the name for any self-forgetting that the sober world disapproves of. To say duniya sharaab-khana — the world is a tavern — is to take that established image and enlarge it until it covers everything: there is no sober outside to retreat to, everyone in the house is intoxicated by something, and the only question left is what. Tanveer Naqvi is writing squarely inside the Urdu ghazal tradition here, and the choice of a woman's voice for a tavern lyric — twice over, across both sides of the record — is the film's own contribution to it.

Hamida Banu sings two of the film's ten songs, this one and the happy version of 'Dil Tu Hi Bata De', both to Tanveer Naqvi's lyrics — which suggests the production treated her as its Urdu-register voice. She was seventeen or so in 1945, Lahore-born, and had come into films after being noticed by Prithviraj Kapoor during her stage work. Sharbati Ankhen was made at Wadia Movietone and directed by Ramchandra Thakur; where a two-part tavern song sat in a story about a family debt and a thwarted marriage is not recorded anywhere.

Nothing is known of this song's reception, and the entry exists to preserve a credit rather than to make a claim. What it does record usefully is a structural detail of 1945 song production — the two-sided long number, and in this instance a two-sided number split between two women's voices — which is the sort of thing that disappears when only titles are indexed. The song is one of four Tanveer Naqvi lyrics in the film.